Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program.

Sequels, reboots, franchises, and songs that remake old songs—does it feel like everything new in popular culture is just derivative of something old? Contrary to popular belief, the reason is not audiences or marketing, but Wall Street. In this book, Andrew deWaard shows how the financial sector is dismantling the creative capacity of cultural industries by upwardly redistributing wealth, consolidating corporate media, harming creative labor, and restricting our collective media culture. Moreover, financialization is transforming the very character of our mediascapes for branded transactions. Our media are increasingly shaped by the profit-extraction techniques of hedge funds, asset managers, venture capitalists, private equity firms, and derivatives traders. Illustrated with examples drawn from popular culture, Derivative Media offers readers the critical financial literacy necessary to understand the destructive financialization of film, television, and popular music—and provides a plan to reverse this dire threat to culture.